Spent Thanksgiving in Virginia. It was a short, relaxing trip where I did more TV watching than in total in the last couple of months. We also made it out to the beach one day.. but yeah, lots of TV.

I've had this camera for a while, but I finally got a first roll of film through this as its newest owner. I think I wrote a post on this Canon A-1 a while ago, but yeah, it's still a strange camera to me, caught between the age of heavy metal cameras and the age of automatic plastic-y SLRs. I'm not really in love with this camera, but it definitely has odd characteristics that make it special. I should be receiving this guys older brother, the Canon F-1, on Monday, so I'll see how that one compares. It's been tough trying to run through film during this past month - less time to shoot and think and with the sun coming at a shallower angle during winter/fall, the hours to shoot are more limited, at least for some of the lighting that appeals to me.

Week 1 of the 8 weeks of surgery is done. It has been a bit slow and surprisingly low stress. Some surgeons do like to pimp, but the majority just get the operations done with some explanation of what's going on. Hours aren't too bad - morning rounds at 6am and the day end around 6pm or 7pm. Ok, maybe that is a long day, but there hasn't been too much to actually deal with.

In terms of the photo, I was sitting in the Met last weekend, somewhat exhausted from the day's wanderings. I thought the pose this kid was taking - somewhat appropriately statue-like in front of this ancient arch, but at the same time, really ridiculous. The mom seems to be also trying to capture that sense of up-and-down/vertical-ness that I saw w/ the boy standing in front of the straight, tall ancient stones.

The past 2+ months of waking up at 7 to get to work at 9:15am are finally over and now it's time to get back to the real world of 5am wake up to be at the hospital for 6am rounds. A bit excited, a bit nervous. Really excited though for weeks 7 and 8 of this 8 week clerkship, where I'm doing the transplant elective = helicopter rides upstate for organ procurement. Yes, transplant surgery is cool...but helicopter rides?! Did I ever imagine I'd be doing this in med school...or a month ago when I was working with patients under Dept of Corrections custody for charges such as...murder.

Anyways, I got through another roll of film, which I took the effort of scanning it completely in using my flatbed scanner. I've got to say, it is much easier via the C41 route, but the normal B&W film + chemicals + scanner = much cheaper. I used a shoddy Paterson auto-load reel and the film had problems leading to some ugly bend marks. I probably should through away those crap reels. Luckily though, a couple of the photos came out as planned. Anyways, over the next 8 wks, I figure my use of film might slow down with real school again.

Here's 3 more photos from today and yesterday:

This roll of film had been sitting in my fridge for a good handful weeks before finally dunking it in chemicals. The scanning is different from the usual C41 film that I have developed at the store. Instead, I ran the negatives through my Epson Perfection 2580, which has a pretty nifty 35mm auto film loader. The quality of the scan is so-so, but then again, I haven't tried printing anything from this roll of film so I really can't tell. I also shot this roll of TMax 3200 at ISO 1600, so I'm really not sure how much of that played into this digital copy of the film. I should pull out some of the store scanned negatives, scan those, and then compare, but maybe some other day.

Anyways, I spotted these guys hanging around Washington Square Park and it's funny how for the most part, people just walked or ran by w/o noticing them. Not easy gear to lug around.